The Left's War on Reality - by Michael Shellenberger & Alex Gutentag (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The road to hell is paved with bad intentions, not good ones.

In The Left's War on Reality, Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag, two former progressives, delve into the unsettling truth behind the Left's policies. What they uncover is far more troubling than mere unintended consequences. Through nine meticulously researched case studies, they reveal a shocking conclusion: the destruction caused by the Left isn't accidental--it's deliberate.

From open borders and trans "medicine" to climate change and Covid, Shellenberger and Gutentag expose how the Left's policies are designed to dismantle nations, communities, and lives. Cloaked in the language of empathy and science, these policies mask a deeper agenda: the systematic erosion of civilization itself.

On each of their key issues, progressives inhabit dream worlds, imagining themselves as heroes and their opponents as villains. Lost in these fantasies, the Left rejects real-world evidence and justifies enormous harm through complicated academic theories, pseudoscientific models, and language games.

When confronted with the problems it creates, the Left blames its enemies. Plummeting literacy scores? Racism. The romantic recession? Toxic masculinity. Mass migration? Western colonialism. Euthanizing poor and lonely people? Inequality. Regretful detransitioners? Transphobia. Skyrocketing overdoses? Anti-drug stigma. Failure of renewables? Climate skepticism.

With sharp analysis and compelling evidence, The Left's War on Reality dismantles the Left's claims of rationality and compassion, showing how progressive policies betray their own ostensible principles and hurt the very people they claim to help.

Review Quotes

"The test for Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag's The War on Reality won't be the reaction when it's published. It will be the reaction of readers fifteen, twenty, thirty years from now, who hopefully will slap their foreheads in shock, amazed that we lived through this period. Using primary-source interviews throughout, Michael and Alex have scrupulously documented how the cultural foundations of our society have been systematically flipped in a short time, allowing male to be female, sickness renamed health, censorship called freedom, authoritarianism couched as caring. The authors correctly identify that this is not a series of disparate issues but one grand project to undermine reality itself. If a child not yet born reads this book twenty years from now and doesn't gasp in horror, it will mean a terrible battle has been lost, with sanity made a form of heresy. That dark future is very possible, if these authors aren't heard." -- Matt Taibbi, award-winning investigative journalist into the Twitter files, publisher of Racket News, and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement

"Modern progressivism's signature maneuver is to punish those who refuse to pretend that the emperor is clothed. In this bracing, deeply researched book, Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag reveal the consequences of this ideological assault on our shared reality. This outstanding book is essential reading for understanding the methods of the ongoing cultural revolution in the West."
-- Abigail Shrier, bestselling author of Irreversible Damage and Bad Therapy

"What on earth has happened to today's left? Is it still the tribune of the working class and universal progressive values? Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag make a compelling case that it is not in their carefully documented new book. All who want to know how and why the left has changed so much should read The Left's War on Reality. It will both enlighten and disturb you." -- Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, co-author The Emerging Democratic Majority and Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

"A clarifying, chilling picture of the modern Left's love of self-aggrandising fantasy worlds and blindness to reality, and a humane plea for the many vulnerable people that are harmed by ideological capture along the way. Anyone tempted by simplified political slogans should read this book and think again."
-- Kathleen Stock, contributing writer at UnHerd; and author of Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death and Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

"In The Left's War on Reality, Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag are knowledgeable and insightful guides to the coalition of bizarre ideologies which has displaced saner versions of the left, corrupted the academy, the media, and other major institutions, ruined many individual reputations and careers, and attacked the foundations of our common culture." -- Michael Lind, author of The New Class War